Response and Page Encoding

You also use the contentType attribute
to specify the encoding of the response. For example, the date application
specifies that the page should be encoded using UTF-8, an encoding that supports
almost all locales, using the following page directive:

<%@ page contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8" %>

If the response encoding weren’t set, the localized dates would
not be rendered correctly.

To set the source encoding of the page itself, you would use the
following page directive:

<%@ page pageEncoding="UTF-8" %>

You can also set the page encoding of a set of JSP pages. The value
of the page encoding varies depending on the configuration specified in the
JSP configuration section of the web application deployment descriptor (see Declaring Page Encodings).